Sculptor’s final work bratwurst? Baloney, some say
Robert Indiana’s helpers say sausage statue was his
The odd, isolated end of Robert Indiana’s life included a lawsuit filed in his final days that accused two associates of taking advantage of the elderly artist in his later years by churning out inauthentic works under his name.
Some friends and art experts joined in the debate, questioning whether Indiana, who died Saturday at 89, was really the creative force behind a series of prints from 2016 that included images of Bob Dylan lyrics and a sculpture this year titled “WINE.”
That conversation is likely to escalate with the discovery Thursday that Indiana’s last monumental sculpture was a tribute to bratwurst. It was commissioned by the owners of Johnsonville Sausage, in Wisconsin, that is one of the country’s largest producers.
Indiana appears to have taken to the task of designing “BRAT” with (sorry) relish, working in the distinctive letters-over-letters format of “LOVE,” his signature work. But the 20-by-20-by-10 foot “BRAT” shakes things up a little by not tilting any of the letters.
Kathleen Rogers, who worked for Indiana as a publicist, was one of several people who had trouble identifying the artist with the work, which was built by fabricators in upstate New York.
“He had been branded a commercial artist after the success of ‘LOVE,’” Rogers said. “He worked so hard to separate himself from that. He would never agree again to this commercialism.”
But Michael McKenzie, a New York art publisher and an associate of Indiana, who worked with the fabricators on the sculpture, said in text messages Thursday that the concept was indeed Indiana’s and that it had been his last monumental work.
“The big thrill for Bob with ‘BRAT’ was the scale,” McKenzie said. “He’s really into major scale, and ‘BRAT’ was out of the box.”
He said Indiana, who took the surname of the state where he was born — he lived in Vinalhaven, Maine — also felt a connection with the Wisconsin company.
“BRAT and Johnsonville are like him,” he said, “Midwest people made good with their things all over the world, including Vinalhaven.”
In the federal lawsuit filed this past week, a company that had long acted as Indiana’s business agent, Morgan Art Foundation, accused McKenzie and the artist’s caretaker in Maine of isolating him from his old friends and business connections so they could market unauthorized or adulterated versions of his work.
McKenzie has said it was the Morgan company that had been mistreating Indiana by not paying him the proper royalties on works he and the company had jointly agreed to sell, a charge the company denied. McKenzie said that all of the artwork he helped Indiana create and distribute in recent years had been conceived and authorized by the artist. “I don’t forge stuff,” he said this past week.
Jamie L. Thomas, the man who helped care for Indiana at home on Vinalhaven, an island just off the coast of Maine, has not responded to phone calls and emails.
The dispute drew a federal investigator to the island Tuesday, according to Sean Hillgrove, 49, who worked for Indiana for many years, often as a driver or maintenance man or as a helper in his studio with his art.
Hillgrove said the FBI agent had spoken to him for more than hour, asking questions that largely tracked with the accusations in the lawsuit and included whether he knew if some of Indiana’s most recent works had been unauthorized forgeries put forward by people close to the artist. Hillgrove said he did not know.
The agent was also concerned with assessing whether many of Indiana’s artworks had recently been taken from the house, he said.
The future of those works and other property owned by Indiana is now certain to be a matter of debate. Indiana was not married and had no children.
Emails between McKenzie and the foundry where “BRAT” was created indicate the full design had not been settled as of May 2017, but the plan was to create it out of aluminum and then send it to an airbrushing company to be painted. Images of the proposed artwork, contained in an email sent to McKenzie by KC Fabrications Inc. in Gardiner, New York, show two versions of the work with different bases, but both were painted in several shades of red.
Nikas said the Morgan company does not believe Indiana conceived the new sculpture. “We do not believe that the “BRAT” sculpture is consistent with the artistic vision behind Indiana’s known works.”